Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to the prior art by inclusion in this section.
Use of forward looking, side view, and rear view cameras are becoming a common feature in latest automotives. Uses of cameras for automotives have also accelerated the development of applications improving vehicle, driver, passenger, and pedestrian safety. Especially, lack of rear visibility technology contribute to high injuries/deaths. These injuries/deaths take place while reversing a car in parking lots, backing up a car from drive ways, and so forth. According to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), about 210 fatalities and 15000 injuries per year are caused in back-over accidents in the U.S. alone. 31 percent of the incidents involve children under age 5. The U.S. Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recently issued a final rule requiring rear visibility technology in all new vehicles under 10,000 pounds by May 2018.
There is an extensive studies available on object and people detections. The limitation of the conventional detectors is that it is not invariant to Radial distortion which is present inherently in the fisheye images and videos.
Fisheye camera images also have extremely wide field of view and image magnification decrease with distance from optical axis. This creates non-uniform sampling of pixels in the image. An example of a fisheye image 10 with radial distortion is shown in FIG. 1.
Due to these reasons, conventional detectors cannot be applied directly on the fisheye images. There has been some work done on modifying Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) descriptors to make them invariant to Radial distortion, however, SIFT features are not suitable for object detection and there has been no effort to develop efficient object detectors for radial distorted fisheye images using SIFT descriptors. Therefore, there is a need to develop efficient techniques which can be used to detect and recognize objects using fisheye camera installed in automotive.